Tips to Bolster Your Foursquare Presence

With more than 10 million users, FourSquare may be the most-used social network, behind Facebook and Twitter. If you own a nightclub, bar or restaurant, you most likely serve guests who check in on FourSquare. But are you strategically engaging your customers? Review the checklist below to see if you are up to date on three of the most important FourSquare practices.

Claim Your Location

To those well versed in FourSquare, this is a no-brainer. Venues on FourSquare fall into two categories, “claimed” and “unclaimed.” Claimed locations have been officially identified by the owners of their establishments to the corporate FourSquare office, which then gives claimants the special privileges of running promotions, editing the page’s information and retrieving statistics on visitor usage. Unclaimed locations, though unmanaged, allow visitors all the same options of checking in and leaving tips but without promotional incentive.

Claiming a location is a simple and painless process that involves clicking a button on your venue’s page and submitting some electronic forms to FourSquare. If you are new to FourSquare, this should be first on your to-do list.

Remind People to Check-In

This tip, like the one above, may seem fairly obvious to heavy FourSquare users. Yet it is important that a business not rely solely on customer word-of-mouth to attract traffic to its FourSquare page. Remember that a check-in is a visit to your establishment, so the more you get people to check-in to your venue, the more business you will receive.

Proactively encourage check-ins by posting the Foursquare logo in your establishment and on your website, reminding people to check in.

Run Promotional Offers

After claiming your location, give people a concrete incentive to visit your establishment by offering them a free drink or appetizer on their first, fifth, or tenth visit. Such practices can end up turning any initial loss in resources into a profit by attracting a greater number of customers to your establishment. These need to be strategically executed with an eye toward increasing current sales.

Following initial competition from other geolocation applications, such as Facebook Places and Gowalla, FourSquare has emerged as the No. 1 GPS-determined location-sharing service. Don’t waste your resources by checking out these other websites; focus on catering to customers on FourSquare by following these tips and tricks.